Access to Instant Messaging (IM) solutions within computer systems is well known in the field of data communications. It is considered that IM solutions will also be used occasionally on dual-mode mobile communication devices (where “dual-mode” refers to an ability to transmit and receive both data and voice), such as wireless telephones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) with wireless or wired communication capabilities. When interconnected properly, IM solutions may be seen to seamlessly provide an ability to send text messages to both wireless devices and landline devices simultaneously. As the level of integration progresses, the market is demanding better and better services for use with IM applications.
The response of IM software providers to these demands has been to provide enhancements to the IM client application and the IM server that provide, to users of the IM client application, an ability to transmit and receive voice data streams and video data streams to the ability to transmit and receive text data streams within an IM conversation. These enhancements allow two people, each associated with a computing station, in an IM conversation to open a voice and/or video channel associated with the already established data channel connecting the two computing stations. The IM client applications executed at each computing station use a microphone and analog to digital converter to provide audio data to an audio encoder. The IM client application may then open an end-to-end TCP/IP connection to exchange voice packets, encoded by the audio encoders, between the two computing stations. The use a microphone may additionally use a web camera or a digital camera to provide video data to a video encoder, The IM client application may then open a TCP/IP connection between the two computing stations and may send the encoded video data via the TCP/IP connection.
These services may be considered “point-to-point” in nature and may be arranged as such due to a need for scalability and based on a manner in which the servers are constructed. As a result, although multipoint-to-multipoint text-based IM conferences may be arranged, more advanced multipoint-to-multipoint audio and video conferences are not supported by typical IM client applications. There have been some attempts to enhance IM client applications to support multiple-person voice conferences but the attempts have been met with limited success and may not support mobile wireless devices.
To address some of these shortcomings, there are limited solutions that provide digital audio streaming conferencing using standalone conferencing applications. There are also Push-to-Talk conferencing applications that provide limited audio conferencing capabilities to users of mobile communication devices. These audio conferencing applications are not connected to text-based conferencing applications and, therefore, these conferencing applications generally do not share data and/or have relation to one other.
These, and many other, problems maintain a separation between text-based messaging applications (e-mail, instant messaging) and audio conferencing applications. Therefore, there remains an important area of integration between various types of conferencing applications that has not been satisfied for dual-mode mobile communication devices.